Bias in favor of the idea that, well, the privileged white male athletes are accused of abusing the poor black woman, we love that. It's in synch with all of our preconceptions and our ideology. Let's pile on and make it a morality play. And an awful lot of people, including the New York Times, for example, were not a bit deterred by contrary evidence from making it a morality play of that kind.
Professor Emeritus Hershel Parker, America's premier Herman Melville scholar: "Maybe there will be a national tipping point on Political Correctness if enough people keep pushing in the sweet tough polite no-nonsense way Stuart Taylor did on PBS."
"Sweet tough polite no nonsense way".
Yes, that description fits Stuart Taylor, America's premier legal commentator.
It also fits Laura Ingraham, star of "The Laura Ingraham Show," America's top female radio star.
When it comes to Political Correctness, the two of them are pushing in the same direction and Ms. Ingraham had Mr. Taylor as a guest on her show on September 4, 2007, the day his book, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Case, was released.
In Durham's Herald-Sun, of all places, there was a good article on the Duke case, by Monica Chen.
Ms. Chen did not bury the very important lead in the article (titled "Lacrosse case will 'get uglier'").
Ms. Chen began:
"Political correctness was to blame.
"That was the message delivered Friday night by Stuart Taylor, co-author of a recent book on the Duke lacrosse case [and, as Ms. Chen later reported, "a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute as well as a regular columnist for National Journal and a contributing editor at Newsweek"}.
"It's spreading like cancer,' he said, referring to the PC movement."
Coincidentally, while Mr. Taylor was at Duke, signing books and speaking, my wife and I were at the Huntington Book Revue, on Long Island, New York awaiting and then listening to the inspirational and insightful political correctness critic Laura Ingraham speak about her latest book, Power to the People.
While Mr. Taylor was admirably filling the Paul Revere role ("PC is coming, PC is coming"), Ms. Ingraham was exhorting her audience to take back their country.
Long Island's politically correct newspaper, Newsday, had sent a reporter to cover politically correctness extremist. Jane Fonda's appearance at Huntington Book Revue during her last book tour, but there was no Newsday article on Laura's appearance this morning.
Political correctness extremists don't want political correctness connected to "shameful injustices," so they abhor the masterpiece by Mr. Taylor and co-author KC Johnson (who created the comprehensive Durham-in-Wonderland website in response to the Duke case), boldly subtitled "Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case." But facts are facts and America had not witnessed such a politically motivated attempted "hi tech lynching" since the political correctness extremists unsuccessfully targeted now United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (for whom Ms. Ingraham served as a law clerk in the United States Supreme Court and whose autobiographical My Grandfather's Son recently replaced Ms. Ingraham's latest book at the top of the New York Times list).
Ms. Chen reported that Mr. Taylor had been invited to speak by the student group Duke Students for an Ethical Duke and "readers of his book and followers of the lacrosse case hung on the author's every word" as "he detailed his involvement in the case from start to finish."
Ms. Chen:
"Taylor excoriated everyone from the news media to Duke University administrators and professors to disbarred Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong.
"But most of all, he decried the political correctness and mob mentality he said overtook many people.
"'The picture of what you can paint of what these people did here is even darker than what we portrayed in this book,' he said. 'As it unravels, I believe it will just get uglier and uglier and uglier.'"
That's what the political correctness extremists fear, but the whole truth should prevail.
Even for Mr Taylor, obtaining a contract to write the book was not easy.
A viewer very familiar with the Duke case posted this comments on the LieStoppers message board: "ST said that around 20 publishers turned down his book proposal. The initial reception would be warm but as the proposal made its way up the chain of command it would get squashed. Sometimes it would be because the Duke laxers weren't choirboys so the story was too ambiguous where the good guys were not truly good guys and other times it was because the laxers were choirboys and clearly not guilty in the first place so where's the interest in that."
There should be interest in the truth about how political correctness has been corrupting America.
Ms. Chen:
"[Mr. Taylor] was particularly harsh toward Duke professors, saying they were so far beyond the left of political spectrum that they sometimes behaved as 'Stalinists' and 'Fascists.'
"'There was such malice, malevolence and hatred that erupted from some of the Duke faculty against the lacrosse players,' he said. 'But there wasn't any medical evidence of rape. It was a fraud.'"
No wonder Until Proven Innocent made Ms. Ingraham's Must Read list!
And no wonder politically correct PBS tried (futilely) to discredit the charge that the media's political bias bore blame for the Duke case when Jeffrey Brown interviewed Mr. Taylor:
JEFFREY BROWN: You look at the media a lot here as one of the institutions that you look at over the course of the year here. And generally you think that it did not perform very well. Why?
STUART TAYLOR: I think they didn't perform well because many of them joined the rush to judgment. The New York Times...
JEFFREY BROWN: No, I mean, what do you think would have made them?
STUART TAYLOR: Their motivation?
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
STUART TAYLOR: I think it was two things working in synch, old-fashioned media sensationalism -- everybody knows what that was, as this is a sensational story -- working together with political correctness, as I call it. You could call it something else.
Bias in favor of the idea that, well, the privileged white male athletes are accused of abusing the poor black woman, we love that. It's in synch with all of our preconceptions and our ideology. Let's pile on and make it a morality play. And an awful lot of people, including the New York Times, for example, were not a bit deterred by contrary evidence from making it a morality play of that kind.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, it's one thing to say that they got the story wrong or they over-sensationalized. That happens a lot in our media. It's another thing to say that it's ideological. What's the evidence for that?
STUART TAYLOR: The evidence is, first, the fact that they ignored the evidence so completely. Second, the way they wrote it. Selena Roberts is a sports columnist in the New York Times, not a reporter, but a columnist. Her columns seethed with class hatred.
I think the first one was headlined "Bonded in Barbarity." And it was full of "the privileged this, the white that." They wore that pretty much on their sleeves more in the columns than in the reporting. In the reporting, it was more a matter of going directly in the teeth of the evidence over and over and over again in almost every story they wrote for many, many months.
And then the question is, well, why would they do that? That's the question you asked me, and I think that's why.
JEFFREY BROWN: At the same time, you point out that this brought out the best in some people. You cite a number of other cases.
STUART TAYLOR: Yes. Yes, in fact, the late, great Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes," among others, did wonderful work on this, came in on the late side, but wonderful work.
Early on, two New York Times columnists, since I've been criticizing the New York Times, I should mention David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof both did distinguished work cutting against the biases of their paper generally. Dan Abrams of MSNBC did good work. There were others, reporters from the Raleigh News and Observer, Joe Neff.
There were a lot of people who did good work, but at the beginning, it was a chorus of condemnation and rush to judgment, with very few exceptions.
That's the generally politically correct media at work! (If you think the politically correct media reformed after the Hoax was exposed and therefore the situation in Jena, Louisiana was accurately reported generally instead of politically correctly reported, read Craig Franklin's "Media Myths About The Jena 6" in The Christian Science Monitor at www.csmonitor.com/2007/1024/p09s01-coop.html.)
Ms. Chen:
"Chapel Hill resident Debrah Correll, a regular poster on Johnson's blog, said Taylor's remarks on political correctness rang true with her.
"'Political correctness has gone beyond anything benign,' she said. 'The victims are the victimizers now because they have everyone's sympathy from the get-go.'"
Right, Ms. Correll.
That's why my first article on the Duke case, posted on April 20, 2006, was titled "Duke rape accuser" victim or victimizer?," reviewed the Tawana Brawley case and concluded, "Until the facts are established, let's call the dancer the accuser, NOT the victim."
(The next day I decided I too had been too politically correct and followed up with an article titled "The right term for that 'exotic dancer,'" in which I wrote:
"Today, it appears that the right term for the 'exotic dancer' (probably should be erotic dancer) may be a jail term and the right term for a least one of the two Duke lacrosse players indicted should be victim of false criminal accusation.
"BUT, perhaps the 'exotic dancer' was raped, but accused the wrong man. The whole truth is still unclear, and should be pursued without fear. The authorities need to investigate very carefully instead of to proceed with the indictment as though it is well founded and be open to the possibility that they were duped as well as the possibility that a honest mistaken identification was made.")
The criminal justice system across America is supposed to be fair, not politically correct.
Ms. Correll, if you haven't read it yet, may I recommend Ms. Ingraham's Power to the People?
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.